I got all my books for school today along with my student ID (my photo's awful, btw. My lip got stuck to my teeth so I have some sort of spooky, pointy Grinch thing going on).
I'm pretty excited for my Shakespeare class. We're doing:
The Tempest
Henry V
King Lear
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Twelfth Night
The Sonnets
Merchant of Venice
Fuck yes on the last one. I've wanted to do Merchant in a classroom setting forever. It's probably horrible, but I've always found Shylock as something of a sympathetic character (that they won't allow him to perform a barbaric act not because it's barbaric but essentally because he's a Jew who isn't equal under the law and thus cannot harm a Christian pissed me off so much. Don't get me started on the whole forced conversion thing). Plus, his monologue. I mean, come on, it's awesome. Truth from the mouth of a "villain" is still the truth.
However, I don't think the argument "Antonio was a dick" would be valid in a college course.
... ... though he totally was. I mean, I hardly wanted Shylock to kill him but actually spitting in someone's face and belittling them for being a Jew is pretty dickish to me.
Anyway, I enrolled in a pay plan and tomorrow have to contact the Michigan Merit Scholarship Department about my $2500 merit award (since their website is broken... lol, of course it is) and send out my AP scores. Awesome news on that front. The woman at Student Resources discovered that my English Lit test does get me out of Eng 170 as well as a Humanities credit. With AP Euro, that's 9 credits all together right off the bat. A+ since that's about $1000 worth of classes right there. Plus, that brings my amount of credits up from 14 to 23 for the semester (awesome).
Lol, I've been reading The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature by Elizabeth Kantor, Ph.D. It's been making me giggle. The cover has a picture of Shakespeare with a button that reads "Dead White Males ROCK!" It's basically about how American English Professors have delved far too deep into deconstructionist theory and, as a result, have become hostile to the classic literary canon and forgotten to profess the truly incredible things these works of literature can teach us about the human condition.
Which is exactly the problem I've always had with literary analysis. It's enjoyable, certainly, but to me a work of literature affects each of us on a deeply personal level and to tear it apart and apply politics and theories that may or may not actually exist in the text is silly.
Perfect example: to me, Hemingway's portrayal of female characters is misogynistic. Chaucer's is not. Period. But to someone else, Chaucer may be viewed as sexist while Hemingway is not (though how is beyond me. I suppose you could argue that ALL of Hemingway's characters are flat. ...He's not sexist, he's just boring?)
Considering that I can find homoeroticism in just about anything, this is all probably deeply hypocritical of me, but there you are.
At any rate, the book makes me laugh. Especially the (sometimes tongue-in-cheek) blurbs like What They Don't Want You to Learn from John Donne: God is even more exciting (and important) than sex.
lol, oh, John Donne.
P.S. I'm still really sad I couldn't fit ENG 140 Horror and Science Fiction into my schedule. Today when I was back in the textbooks I saw that they're going to do Carrie. That's AWESOME. They're also doing Rosemary's Baby and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and Hannibal (though why they'd do that instead of Silence of the Lambs is beyond me).
Augh, I'm really bummed now. :(
I'm pretty excited for my Shakespeare class. We're doing:
The Tempest
Henry V
King Lear
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Twelfth Night
The Sonnets
Merchant of Venice
Fuck yes on the last one. I've wanted to do Merchant in a classroom setting forever. It's probably horrible, but I've always found Shylock as something of a sympathetic character (that they won't allow him to perform a barbaric act not because it's barbaric but essentally because he's a Jew who isn't equal under the law and thus cannot harm a Christian pissed me off so much. Don't get me started on the whole forced conversion thing). Plus, his monologue. I mean, come on, it's awesome. Truth from the mouth of a "villain" is still the truth.
However, I don't think the argument "Antonio was a dick" would be valid in a college course.
... ... though he totally was. I mean, I hardly wanted Shylock to kill him but actually spitting in someone's face and belittling them for being a Jew is pretty dickish to me.
Anyway, I enrolled in a pay plan and tomorrow have to contact the Michigan Merit Scholarship Department about my $2500 merit award (since their website is broken... lol, of course it is) and send out my AP scores. Awesome news on that front. The woman at Student Resources discovered that my English Lit test does get me out of Eng 170 as well as a Humanities credit. With AP Euro, that's 9 credits all together right off the bat. A+ since that's about $1000 worth of classes right there. Plus, that brings my amount of credits up from 14 to 23 for the semester (awesome).
Lol, I've been reading The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American Literature by Elizabeth Kantor, Ph.D. It's been making me giggle. The cover has a picture of Shakespeare with a button that reads "Dead White Males ROCK!" It's basically about how American English Professors have delved far too deep into deconstructionist theory and, as a result, have become hostile to the classic literary canon and forgotten to profess the truly incredible things these works of literature can teach us about the human condition.
Which is exactly the problem I've always had with literary analysis. It's enjoyable, certainly, but to me a work of literature affects each of us on a deeply personal level and to tear it apart and apply politics and theories that may or may not actually exist in the text is silly.
Perfect example: to me, Hemingway's portrayal of female characters is misogynistic. Chaucer's is not. Period. But to someone else, Chaucer may be viewed as sexist while Hemingway is not (though how is beyond me. I suppose you could argue that ALL of Hemingway's characters are flat. ...He's not sexist, he's just boring?)
Considering that I can find homoeroticism in just about anything, this is all probably deeply hypocritical of me, but there you are.
At any rate, the book makes me laugh. Especially the (sometimes tongue-in-cheek) blurbs like What They Don't Want You to Learn from John Donne: God is even more exciting (and important) than sex.
lol, oh, John Donne.
P.S. I'm still really sad I couldn't fit ENG 140 Horror and Science Fiction into my schedule. Today when I was back in the textbooks I saw that they're going to do Carrie. That's AWESOME. They're also doing Rosemary's Baby and Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and Hannibal (though why they'd do that instead of Silence of the Lambs is beyond me).
Augh, I'm really bummed now. :(
tired
awake
amused